


Exploration of the Astral Plane: An Immersive, Multidimensional Study, by Cary Loudermilk, PhD, and Oliver Anthony Bird.

by Rockinlibrarian



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Backstory, For Science!, Gen, Pre-Canon, That tag was already here and I appreciate that, The Astral Plane
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rockinlibrarian/pseuds/Rockinlibrarian
Summary: Oliver Bird has found a new realm to play in, leaving Cary frantically trying to keep him from getting in over his (and everyone's) head.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. In which Oliver first ventures outward. Inward. Wherever.

Oliver felt preamble was beneath him. He sauntered into the lab at Summerland one day and opened with, “What do you know about alternate dimensions?”

After nearly twenty years of friendship, Cary had ceased to be thrown off by Oliver’s sudden discussion starters. He paused his sensor calibrations only the briefest moment to gather his words, then replied, “Alternate dimensions? It’s kind of a misnomer. People tend to use it in regards to the multiverse theory, in that every possibility that could exist, does exist, in an alternate timeline, an alternate universe, so—”

“No, no, you’re right, it is a misnomer.” Oliver waved the explanation aside. “I mean actual dimensions of _this_ universe. You have length width depth time so forth, but what about— other levels? Other planes of existence?”

Cary nodded. “String theory, then. The universe is made of strings, not points, of infinite length. Many of them are curled up so tightly they can’t be perceived by humankind, and these make up dimensions beyond the four we know.”

Oliver leaned against a file cabinet and gazed past the ceiling. “Did I ever tell you where I got the name ‘Summerland’?”

“Is this related?”

“Extremely. Leadbeater. The Theosophist.”

“You’re into Theosophy n-?”

“Of course not, I just like the word.” Oliver began to pace. “Leadbeater’s Summerland is where souls wait to be reincarnated into a higher form. Unlike our little palace of transformation here, _his_ Summerland is not a physical place, but a spiritual, mental plane superimposed over our reality— a separate dimension, see, a realm of ghosts and dreams.”

This rang bells in Cary’s head that went way further back than his scientific studies. “…Wakiksuya?” He muttered to himself in Lakota for a moment before explaining to Oliver, “My, my grandparents told me stories about medicine men who were, who were like shaman who could walk between worlds—this world, and, and the spirit world—”

“Exactly! That’s what I’m getting at!” Oliver flipped a chair into place about six inches away from Cary, then straddled it backwards to lean over the backrest.

Cary instinctively backed up, shaking his head. “I-I-I don’t know anything about—shamaning, I never even completed a vision quest, Mama thought I was too, well—”

“Delicate!” Kerry supplied helpfully from the bench press at the back of the room. He didn’t get to snap “Not helping!” at her before Oliver interrupted.

“Not you, me!”

“S-some of my aunts might have something to say about cultural appropri—”

“Not with your Native American spiritualism, I’m talking _scientific exploration_. I’ve been reading the work of Dr. Charles Xavier, Englishman based in New York, powerful telepath, and he claims to have done it!”

“Done wh—walked in the spirit world?”

“The Astral Plane. The mental dimension! It’s the source of my own telepathic talents, apparently; it’s what I’ve been using when I affect other people’s perceptions. But I haven’t _begun_ to tap its potential. According to Xavier, I could project my entire consciousness into this plane and create entirely _new_ mental realities.” Oliver leaned in again. “If we approach this correctly, methodically, with scrupulous data-collection, we will be at the forefront of a completely new frontier of discovery!”

Cary paused to process this. “But if this is only a dream world—”

“Ah, ah, do not underestimate the powers of the mind, my friend! We think, therefore we _are_. Who knows how closely the two are linked? What if _all_ of reality is but a dream?”

“This seems…unusually metaphysical for you, Oliver.”

“That's why I need _you_ to keep me scientifically grounded.” He grabbed a handful of wired electrodes off the top of the electroencephalograph and held them out to Cary like a small child presenting a bouquet of dandelions to his mother. “Hook me up, as they say in the vernacular.”

“What, now? You’re not even going to write up a proposal or—”

“Formalities, Dr. Loudermilk, always with the formalities! I know what I’m doing. We just need the numbers.” He nodded toward the EEG and gave the electrodes a little shake.

“You know what you’re doing, and yet you’ve never done this before?” Cary found himself taking the electrodes and peeling off the sticky tabs despite his doubts, though. Oliver could be very persuasive, even without psychic manipulation.

“I know the theory. It’s time to practice.” Oliver double-checked the electrodes at his temples, then settled back in his chair, shifting to get comfortable. “I’ll handle all the psychic projecting, you just watch the monitors.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Now…I’m going to…project my consciousness into the Astral Plane…so don’t get nervous if I stop talking for a bit.”

Cary nodded and smothered a smile. “Thank you for the warning.”

Soon enough, Oliver fell silent, and still. Perfectly still. The brainwaves on the monitor gradually slowed. The frequency settled into a deep delta, and stayed there. Unwavering. It wasn’t quite sleep, but deeper than meditation.

For a minute, five minutes, half an hour, there was no variation in the wave at all. It was almost mechanical.

Surely after an hour…

or ninety minutes, a full sleep cycle…

but nothing changed. Oliver was alive, but he wasn’t _doing_ anything. He was an organic shell.

Kerry wandered over, watched the monitor over his shoulder for a moment, then tilted her head and made a face at Oliver. “Is this what passes for earth-shattering science nowadays?”

“Scientific discovery takes patience,” Cary reminded her. “We’re gathering important data right now.”

They watched Oliver in silence for another minute or two, then both spoke at once. “Want to play hangman?”

“Maybe I should—okay,” Kerry agreed.

Several hours later, Melanie woke them up—exactly when they had drifted off, neither was sure. “Oliver said he was making sauerbraten for dinner, but he hasn’t started—” she gaped at her still-absent husband for a moment “—so I guess we’re eating in the cafeteria tonight, then?”

“Didn’t we have the sauerbraten yesterday?” Oliver opened his eyes, squinting in the light. “I could have sworn—”

“FINALLY,” Kerry sighed.

“What?” Oliver looked mildly offended. “It’s only been—”

Cary checked the clock. “Eight hours?”

“No. Well, I was going to say it’s only been fifteen minutes or so but now you’ve confused me with the sauerbraten. Either it’s been fifteen minutes or… three days.”

Melanie took in the sensors hooked to her husband and the weary expressions on her friends’ faces. “What have you been doing?”

“Drawing the scenery. Literally. And apparently making sauerbraten yesterday.” His frown dissolved into delight. “Have you ever had a lucid dream, one where you simply up and decide something different should happen and bam, it does? Imagine that, but with complete control. A full sensory experience, too—not just a hint of scent here, a sudden texture there, peripheries morphing into fog around the edges—no, a firm reality that only slips away if _you_ want it to! Cary! What does our data look like now?”

“Uh, it seems, um….” Cary turned back to the monitor and called up a report screen. “It seems you were in a trance state for, um, 463 minutes and eight seconds, and, uh, that’s really all it shows.”

Oliver squinted somewhere above his head. “Really? Hmm. Anticlimactic.”

“You must feel very refreshed,” Melanie remarked uncertainly.

“I should probably go back a little longer just to be sure.”

“Dinner?” his wife cut in.

“Right, what about, just a brief look around, then I’ll come back.”

“I-I-I don’t know if this is really the best time to, to…” Cary began.

“You thought eight hours was fifteen minutes,” Kerry said flatly at the same time.

“OR three—I see.” Oliver’s enthusiasm deflated a bit under the bemused frowns of his wife, his best friend, and his best friend’s terrifyingly adolescent other-half. He sighed, then straightened up. “I’ll just have to do my own exploring after-hours. Now to that sauerbraten. I’m afraid it will be a late dinner tonight, you might want to grab a snack if you’re peckish.”

“Cary wants a snack,” Kerry volunteered.

“You know if you want a snack you can—” Kerry snapped into place and Cary’s stomach immediately rumbled. “Yes, I guess I would then.”

“If I was in the Astral Plane I could summon you something immediately—”

“Oliver, the sauerbraten still isn’t cooking,” Melanie warned.

“Right, my dear. On my way. But seriously, I could—”

The Birds exited, leaving Cary alone to contemplate how to possibly summarize all this in the research notes. Until Kerry reminded him about that snack.


	2. In which Oliver takes a couple of friends on a magical mystery tour

“Is it addictive?”

“What?”

“Is this Astral Walking addictive?” Melanie clarified. “Oliver is starting to act like a junkie, trying to hide how desperate he is for his next hit.”

That was getting uncomfortably far out of Cary’s wheelhouse. “Well, there are n-no substances involved—”

“It’s not about substances, it’s about a mental state. He’s—”

“Good morning, you effervescent stardust of a family, mine! It’s time for another adventure in the infinite expanse of the mind!” The alleged astral junkie in question swept through the door and straight to the EEG. 

Melanie quickly excused herself. The trick to keeping secrets from a psychic was to avoid rousing his suspicion, and the weight of the interrupted conversation, if she left it hanging there, would have certainly aroused suspicion.

Cary could easily channel the weight on his own end into the present discussion. “Oliver, every time we’ve hooked you up here for the past two weeks, we’ve gotten the same results: nothing! You go into a deep trance state, a-a-and you stay there. There is no way to, to objectively measure these experiences you claim to be having!”

“You assume we’re doing this the same way we have been, which is erroneous.” Oliver stuck a set of electrodes to his own forehead and immediately picked up a second set. “We’re taking another giant leap today. This is the real test. Anyone can make a dreamworld for themselves. But can he make that dreamworld for others?”

He attached the new electrodes to either side of Cary’s head. Cary swung an arm up too late. “What are you—”

“This time I’m taking you with me.” Oliver stretched a hand toward his face.

Everything vanished except himself, Oliver, and one very annoyed teenaged girl. “What the heck, I was sleeping,” Kerry moaned.

“Sorry about that, Girl-Kerry, I forgot about you there—”

“Well _that’s_ offensive.” Kerry scooted closer to Cary, as if trying to get back in. He put an arm around her and tried to collect his own bearings. So this was the Astral Plane. Not much to obsess over.

“But, important point made: mental realm, mental consciousnesses, corporeal bodies are beside the point. Obvious, really. Write that down.”

“Write that down whe—” a notepad and pencil appeared in Cary’s hands before he could finish speaking. “Oh-okay, then.”

“Where are we and why are there no wa— anythings?” Kerry looked around, holding on to Cary’s sleeve.

“Because I haven’t put them there yet! We can be anywhere we want to be!”

“It…it’s all totally mental,” Cary tried to explain to Kerry, who replied, “Yeah no kidding.”

Oliver snapped his fingers, and they found themselves in a graffitied, windowless pub, stuffed to capacity by dancing, screaming young adults. “CAVERN CLUB, ‘63,” Oliver shouted over the rock and roll music coming from the curiously familiar-looking band on the stage. “WE ARE PART OF MUSIC HISTORY BEING MADE!”

“Is that…IS THAT REALLY—?” Cary pointed the pencil toward the stage.

“NO, JUST A SORT OF RECORDING. A MEMORY. IT WOULD BE AWFULLY RUDE TO PULL THE REAL ONES’ CONSCIOUSNESSES OUT OF WHEREVER JUST TO GIVE US A PRIVATE CONCERT, WOULDN’T IT!”

“YEAH, RUDE!” Kerry agreed, but she was grinning and dancing along with the crowd.

“MAYBE WE SHOULD GO SOMEWHERE…A LITTLE QUIETER!” Cary suggested. “SO WE CAN TALK WITHOUT SHOUTING. ALSO, IS THE SMOKE REALLY NECESSARY, I’M STARTING TO HAVE TROUBLE BR-” the club had been replaced by a vast savanna “—eathing?”

“How does the Serengeti suit you?” Oliver asked.

“Great!” said Kerry. “Can I wrestle a lion?”

“No!” Cary said, just as Oliver said, “Yes!”

“N- _no_!” Cary repeated, to Oliver this time.

“It would be a fantastic test of the limits of the mental—were you really having trouble _breathing_ in that smoky club?”

“Yes!” Cary reminded him peevishly, “I’m asthmatic.”

“You don’t have _lungs_!” Oliver looked triumphant. “You must have been having a psychosomatic reaction to the _impression_ of a smoky room which I was projecting into your mind! Write that down.”

Cary resumed writing everything that had happened in the notepad. “But if everything here is purely mental, will we even still have these notes when we, uh, wake up again?”

“I have no idea. Most likely not. Write that down, anyway.”

“And the lion?” Kerry looked back from where she had wandered, deeper into the tall grass.

“Maybe, could we maybe test the limits of our—our mental existence in a _smaller_ way, first? Like, falling while ice skating, or—”

“Why not?” Oliver snapped his fingers, and their little patch of savanna was now covered in a smooth sheet of ice.

Cary glanced down at his now skate-shod feet, watched them start to slide away from each other, and floundered. “For Pete’s sake, Oliver!”

“Cary! You always do this.” Kerry glided over and took his hands. “You know you can skate perfectly well, you just start panicking. Take a deep breath and trust your feet.”

She pulled him into a circle and they spun smoothly around each other, just like when they were kids: before he’d become The Grown-Up, she taking care of him just as much, if not more, than he took care of her. He smirked a little and leaned toward her. “Well, how are we supposed to test the limits of Oliver’s mental creation if none of us fall down?”

As if to counteract the sentimentality, Kerry turned to Oliver and asked, “Can the lion have ice skates too?”

“KERRY!”

“What?”

“No lions!”

Oliver tsked and joined their circle. “You, my friend, are displaying a distressing lack of imagination.”

“And you know what Einstein said…” Kerry added, then the three of them recited together, “’Imagination is more important than knowledge’.”

“Yes, yes.” Cary rolled his eyes. “Still, we’ve got to put _some_ effort into making this Thought Experiment presentable—”

“Mind the wildebeest.” Oliver pulled them to a tree at the edge of the ice pond, and a stampede of front-heavy bovine plowed past, reducing the ice to muddy slush under its hooves. “I may have been straining the credibility of my own imagination there, putting an ice rink in the middle of the savanna, who does that?”

“ _Exactly_. We’re….” Cary tried to take a step forward and his ice skate wobbled in the mud. He pointed. “Oliver….”

“Oh, yes.” Oliver waved his hand, and they all wore hiking boots instead. “You were saying about me being exactly right?”

“I was saying, actually, that I don’t think we should be haphazardly putting ice rinks in the savanna. We need a—a _structure_. We need to set a specific hypothesis to test—"

“Like what happens if I wrestle a lion on the Astral Plane?”

Cary winced. “That’s not…that’s _an_ experimental question but not, not really what I had in—"

“Oliver?” Kerry pleaded at him.

Oliver tilted his head toward Cary. “I’m afraid I _am_ going to have to defer to your other half on this one, he _is_ your legal guardian, technically.”

“Just because he has a birth certificate.”

“I’m also older.”

“Are n—”

“ _Developmentally_.”

“And a known pushover.” Oliver winked at Kerry.

“Oh, come on—” Cary said, just as Kerry grinned and threw her arms around his middle.

“Please please please please!”

“Where else will she ever get an opportunity like this?” Oliver shrugged. “But it’s your call, of course.”

“And it’s all in Oliver’s mind anyway!”

“You are a terrible influence! If you’re really sure—"

“We’d better be,” Oliver noted, “because generally when a herd of wildebeest stampedes it’s because a lioness is on their—oops, here she is.”

There, indeed, a lioness slinked, stalking forward in the direction the herd had run, ignoring the three random humans to her side. Kerry sucked in her breath and slinked toward the lion herself, matching the movements of the creature as closely as a primate can. 

She had nearly reached the beast, and was reaching her hand forward, when the lion turned to her and snarled.

Kerry shrieked and dashed back to Cary as if intending to merge, but plowed into and knocked him over instead. The lion leaped toward their now-prone forms. Cary shouted, “Take us home, Oliver!”

Instantly, the lion was gone. They were sprawled on a bright green lawn, beneath a wide, shrubby tree. “ _Now_ where are we?” Kerry asked.

A tidy blue house stood behind them, a car about thirty years out of date sitting in the short drive. In front of them, across a one-lane road and over a hill, they could just see a bit of some large body of water.

“Home, of course.” Oliver observed the surroundings smugly, then turned to squint at the twins. “You don’t live here, do you. Damn, must have got a bit mixed up somewhere… oh, never mind. All good. Welcome to Casa de Bird, Seatoun, Eastern Ward, Wellington.”

His baseless confidence made Cary lose his own entirely. “Wait, did you actually bring us to New Zealand, or are we still in the Astral Plane?”

Oliver paused thoughtfully for a little longer than Cary cared for. “The latter. Unless we’ve time-traveled, because I’m fairly certain I was responsible for the ultimate destruction of that car.”

“ _Could_ we have time-traveled?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, there’s no such thing.” He reached up into the tree. “And this branch broke _off_ under me, when I was ten. Then my arm broke under me. Hmm.” He stepped onto a lower limb and pulled himself up onto another.

“I-if that didn’t hold you when you were ten, I doubt—Kerry, _two_ of you up there won’t help!” 

Kerry swung among the branches like monkey bars. “This is a fantastic climbing tree!”

“Isn’t it?” Oliver settled into a curve of branches. “I can spend hours up here with enough snacks and comics.”

Cary watched them warily. “Very…very nice. But we really should be getting home, for real. You know your sense of time never matches, who knows how late it’s gotten.”

“We _are_ home.”

“No, no, this is where _you used_ to live! Kerry and I…we…have never been here at all!”

Kerry shifted forward on her branch to frown at Oliver. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Never been better.” Oliver peered back at her in mild puzzlement.

“Well, _I_ want to go home,” Cary snapped. “My ho— _our_ home. Summerland.”

Oliver stared down at him in deeper puzzlement. “Where’s that, then?”

“Uh-oh, Oliver blew a circuit.” Kerry gaped at him.

“I have not! I’ve just…” he leaned back again and gazed through the canopy above, “…this place is so familiar, it’s like I never left.”

Cary sighed. “Okay, then, let’s, let’s start here. Is this where you were when you found out your uncle left you that ranch in the States?”

Oliver stared pensively at him for a moment. “Well not in this tree. Inside there.”

No sooner had he pointed toward the house, than they found themselves gazing across a cluttered dining room table at two men and a woman—Cary recognized Oliver’s parents, though younger here, from the Birds’ wedding—frozen in animated pantomime over the second man’s briefcase full of papers.

A stocky boy with a mop of dark curls pointed at them and said, “My mother was rather scornful of the whole affair: what’s a boy like me going to do with an American horse farm and all.” The woman mouthed her lines as he said them, grimacing at the paper she was holding away from the lawyer.

Little Oliver trampled across the room to take the paper from his mother, part of the memory himself while simultaneously narrating it to Cary and Kerry. “But I knew it was a ticket to adventure, an excuse to see the world. I knew then and there I’d go abroad for University, with the help of my new U.S. address.”

“And that’s where you met us!” Kerry exclaimed. “And Melanie!”

A curious smile came over Oliver’s face. “Melanie! Yes.” Instantly they were sitting on a picnic blanket in the central grove of an austere college campus. It was a place Cary knew well (though not with the picnic blanket— that must have been a Melanie-related memory of Oliver’s), and _that_ , ever so slightly, calmed his nerves.

Oliver looked more like the Oliver he was used to again, though with much less gray. And Kerry looked twelve. Cary assumed he, too, now appeared as he had when they’d all been at the University together, which at least seemed familiar.

“All right, this— we’re getting closer.” He pulled out the notebook and pencil again, not to take notes, but to use as a prop. “This is where we started making plans to turn your uncle’s old horse farm into…?” He waited for Oliver to fill in the blank.

Oliver knit his brow. “…a…dairy…farm?”

Cary and Kerry groaned in unison.

“It would be a marvelous idea though. We could open an ice creamery.” A cow strolled by, lugging a cart with fully-topped waffle cones suspended in a rack. Oliver lifted out three of the cones and handed two to his friends.

Kerry goggled at hers in bemusement. Cary’s curiosity got the better of him and he poked a finger into the whipped cream. Hmm. Not bad for a figment of Oliver’s imagination.

He shook his head. “Summerland. That…that’s what we were planning, here. You must remember. It…it was _your vision!_ We were all just following your lead!”

“Summerland,” Oliver murmured. “Where souls wait to be reborn in a higher form.”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s what you always said!” Cary sat up on his knees to lean forward, noticed the ice cream cone again as he caught his balance, and took another bite. “And right now, we…our bodies…are there, waiting for, for our _souls_ to, to come _back_ to them. At Summerland. We need you to… to _please_ … take us back there.”

At once, the campus dissolved around them, leaving them, again, in the empty white nothingness. “Is this… closer?” Kerry muttered finally.

“I’m not sure,” Cary muttered back.

“The Astral Plane can be whatever we want it to be,” Oliver said, as if they’d only just arrived.

“And it’s…it’s incredible, yes, but right now, we, we need to leave it for awhile. Go back home to the physical world. To our physical bodies.” Cary paused to take in the disappointment on Oliver’s face. “Please?”

“But we’ve only just _begun_!” Oliver pouted.

“Maybe…maybe later,” Cary said as cheerfully as he could.

“Oh, very well.” Oliver snapped his fingers…

…and they were back in the lab, still hooked to the EEG. “Kerry, you all right?” Cary breathed.

_Yep. Everything back to normal here_.

“Look at the time!” Oliver pointed to the monitor. “It was only two minutes! I don’t know what you were so worried about.”

“N-nothing to worry about at all,” Cary said through his teeth. He tugged off his electrodes and tossed them on the counter. “Excuse me a minute.”

He ducked into the hall and headed for Melanie’s office. She appeared to have only just sat down. She glanced up at him, eyebrows raised.

“It’s not addictive,” he announced. “I have absolutely n-no temptation to _ever_ do that again.”

Melanie blinked. “All right, then.”


	3. In Which Oliver Goes Dreamwalking and Gets Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Several weeks later....

“Even though the overall percentage of matter to space is so low, the wall is impermeable because of the electromagnetic forces holding the molecules together.” He could sense the committee’s impatience with this rudimentary background knowledge, so he sped up, but that only made his stutter worse. “I-i-in order for a-another solid object to pass, to pass through the wall, one would have to somehow negate the force—” the chalk in his fingers slid through the board, leaving no mark. “…Excuse me, that’s not supposed to happen, because we haven’t negated the, the—” he tried to write with the chalk again, and this time the chalk fell through the board and out the other side.

“ _Mister_ Loudermilk, are you wasting our time?” the Dean of Physics demanded.

“N-no, sir, in fact you see my theory was correct, the electromagnetic force must have been—”

“Hackneyed,” the Assistant Dean muttered.

“Hold up,” said a new voice, and Oliver Bird stepped out of the chalkboard. “Stop perturbing my friend. And _you_ ,” he pointed at Cary, “you just need to show those imaginary forces who’s in charge here. See? Be solid, you!” he shouted at the board. Then he picked up a piece of chalk and scribbled a little Kilroy face next to Cary’s calculations. 

“What are you doing here?” Cary hissed at him. “I’m trying to defend my dissertation.”

“No, you’re not. You’re trying to work out how that new girl at Summerland walks through walls, in your sleep. Your subconscious summons up _these_ fellows whenever you’re feeling the need to prove a theory to yourself.” The dissertation committee grumbled at him. Oliver raised his voice and said, “Yes, you insidious inner critics, scat, we don’t need you.” The committee turned to smoke.

“Did you just vaporize half the Physics Department?!”

“You _dreamed_ them, and _I_ told them to go away.” Oliver shrugged. “They were just making you doubt what you’d already figured out. If you weren’t sure about your theories, you should have asked me when we were awake. You would’ve slept better.”

This was a dream. Of course. That would account for why the lecture hall had suddenly turned into his lab at Summerland, elaborately decorated for Halloween. “So can you explain why my subconscious has summoned _you_ up now?”

“It hasn’t. I’m here of my own free will. Delightful, isn’t it?” Oliver picked up a grinning pumpkin head and mirrored its expression back at it. The similarity was a little unnerving.

“Wait.” Cary fell into a chair and raised a finger, trying to find the words. “Are you saying you’re the real Oliver, not a dream Oliver? The, the _actual_ Oliver Bird is experiencing _my_ dream with _his_ consciousness?”

“Didn’t I tell you the Astral Plane is the realm of dreams? Why shouldn’t I be able to pop into someone else’s dream if I so desired?” Oliver rearranged the pumpkins on top of the monitors and stepped back to admire his work.

“Well, that’s a little…invasive, don’t you think?”

Oliver paused. “Yes, I suppose it is, a bit. But imagine the possibilities! Immersive psychoanalysis! Secret trysts! Someone else to help remember the bits you can’t quite grasp the next morning! Did you know this one’s real?” He plucked a bat from a black tinsel garland and let it fly away.

“I didn’t—I don’t know where the decorations came from.”

“Your mind, obviously. Something about this situation reminds you of spooks. Or October. Or both. Didn’t we meet in October? Never mind, let’s get to work. Have you figured out how to write up this interaction we’re having, properly for peer review, yet?”

Cary gaped at him. “…what peers?” He shook his head. “Oliver, you-you’ve… _literally_ sprung this on me in my sleep! If we’d hooked ourselves up to the EEG before bed we _might_ have something to, to go on, but—”

“Huh. That’s a shame, when we have all the necessary equipment right here.” Oliver pulled a set of sensors out of the nearest jack-o-lantern and frowned at them.

“Except that’s dream equipment, so it’s not going to give us any hard numbers.”

“No, indeed. The readout on this one appears to say, ‘Stop being an ass, Oliver’.” He squinted at Cary. “…Are you repressing some anger?”

“I-I am admittedly a little… _flustered_ right now, seeing that you’ve interrupted my nightly mental refresh process without warning. Even Kerry doesn’t…well, sometimes she does. But that’s different, she belongs here!”

Oliver set down the sensors and peered at Cary in an almost pityingly way. “This is still _your_ dream, you know. You can make it go however you like.”

 _This is my dream._ This wasn’t like before, when Oliver dragged him helplessly from illusion to illusion. He was in control. He straightened up and clenched his fists. “Okay. This is _my_ dream, and _I’m_ waking up now.”

He forced his eyes open. His room glowed soft gray in the moonlight. Crisp sheets lay against his body. All was calm. All was real.

But he could still hear Oliver, clearer than ever— sounding a lot like Kerry did most of the time. _Now this is interesting. Very complex setting. It’s almost as if… Cary? Where are you?_

“Where are _you_? _I_ woke up. I think.” He sat up and switched on the bedside lamp.

 _But this was_ your _dream, how could you have…_

Cary put on his glasses and glanced suspiciously around the apparently empty room. “Oliver, why are you still in my head?”

_Am I? I wond— oh, hello, Girl-Kerry._

_What the freak, Oliver?!_ Kerry popped out onto the end of the bed and gawked at Cary. “That is _so wrong_.”

_I suppose I’m intruding on her territory, aren’t I?_

“Can’t you just wake up?”

_I’m not—I’m not really sure where to go from here…_

“Back to your own body!”

Kerry grimaced. “…do you look this weird when it’s _me_ talking to you?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. But I’m _used_ to _you_. I probably look even stranger now just out of… _discomfort_.”

_I’ll try not to disturb anything in here, I promise. You know, you have a surprising amount of headspace devoted to musical theater. Why haven’t you mentioned that? We should put on a revue._

Cary pinched his forehead in both hands. “You can’t— you can’t stay here! You have your own body to possess!”

“And I’m not gonna share,” Kerry shouted pointedly.

_I don’t know where my body IS, is all…_

“Well it’s…just down the hall, with Melanie, I assume. It’s the middle of the night.”

“So wait, if we wake Oliver up, he won’t be in our head anymore?”

“That would make— Kerry? Don’t— don’t just go barging in on—” She was already out the door, storming toward Oliver and Melanie’s bedroom. “At least knock f—”

She slammed open the door. “OLIVER WAKE UP!”

_I’m perfectly cognizant..._

“What? What is it?” Melanie hastily grabbed a kimono and wrapped it around herself. Beside her, Oliver’s slumbering form didn’t stir.

“I’m so sorry to burst in like this,” Cary told her.

Kerry marched toward Oliver and commenced poking him and shaking him and yelling “OL-LEE-VER!” in his ear.

Melanie, who had jumped to her feet, sat back on the bed and turned her attention to her husband. “Oliver? What’s wrong with him? Why isn’t he—?”

“He went dreamwalking and ended up stuck in _my_ head.”

 _I don’t think I’m STUCK, I just…oh! There he is_. On the bed, Oliver stretched and rolled onto his back. “Just because I got a little off-course doesn’t mean I was _stuck_. I knew I’d find my way here _eventually_. Stop that.” He pushed Kerry’s hand away, as she had continued to poke him.

Melanie shook her head. “What’s he talking about, you went dreamwalking? What were you doing in Cary’s head?”

“I wanted to see if I could go farther afield. Aim for the dreams of someone I’m not currently in direct contact with. I’ve been in _your_ dreams plenty of times, my dear.” He looked meaningfully at his wife, who slowly smiled and said “ooh!” and leaned over to nuzzle noses.

“Ew?” Kerry gave them an aghast look from where she sat at the foot of their bed.

Cary tried to steer the conversation back on point with some firm arm gestures. “You, not remembering how to get back to your body…it’s becoming a problem, Oliver! You have to master getting _home_ again before you go…farther afield. If you were to get lost in there—or out there, wherever—and no one was around to help… we can’t go _after_ you!”

Oliver sat up and thought for a moment. “So you’re suggesting a buddy system?”

“Well, ye—maybe. No.” This had the potential to put Cary exactly where he didn’t want to be. Again. “I’m not sure what I’m suggesting, exactly.” He started to pace. “You’ve got to give…whoever you take along with you sufficient warning, and even…make sure you actually have their consent first, and…look, there, there’s no way to be sure anyone _else_ can, can get you home, either, so maybe we should come up with something more concrete.” He sat on the edge of the bed, then jumped up again at the impropriety of it. He gathered his thoughts with his hands. “Something to physically anchor you to the material realm. A, a tether, of some sort, that you can follow, follow back home.”

“Ariadne’s string, to guide me out of the labyrinth of the mind,” Oliver mused.

“Can you _take_ something material into the Astral Plane?” Melanie looked from her husband, to Cary, and back again. “Won’t it just become as ethereal as the rest of you?”

“THAT—” Cary pointed, “that’s the question. How would some additional item you might take with you be any different than, say, the clothes you’re wearing at the time. As if _they_ could keep you anchored to the real thing.” He gestured toward Oliver, who, he suddenly became acutely aware, was sitting bare-chested, sheet loosely falling over his lap. “You’re— you’re not even wearing clothes, at the moment.”

Oliver tilted his head. “Yes, I _was_ considerate enough to get mentally dressed before visiting you. You have to grant me that much.” Under his breath to Melanie, he added, “Unlike some of my dream visits.”

She swatted him and, before Kerry could throw up on their bed, suggested, “Maybe it needs to be something symbolic. A _reminder_ of how to get home. If you tie off your Ariadne’s string here in reality—”

“The corporeal, or material, plane,” Oliver interrupted. “I assure you, the Astral Plane is just a different _kind_ of reality.”

Melanie pursed her lips, but continued, “Right. Tie it off here, but unwind it behind you astrally as you explore. If you follow it back it should lead you to where you started on the Astral Plane, and then it shouldn’t seem _so_ far to jump, back home. Am I getting the physics of this right?” She turned to Cary.

He shrugged. “As…as far as I can tell. It’s as rational a plan as we can make, at least.”

“Hmm. Hansel and Gretel lost in the wood. And I’m both of them.” This seemed to please Oliver. “Now I just have to decide what to make that trail of breadcrumbs out of. Not literal breadcrumbs. You never know what sort of being might come along in a dreamworld to eat up any breadcrumbs. Then again, you never know if you’ll run into a being who eats string, either. Oh well. At any rate, it’s something to think over. Now should we all get back to sleep?”

Kerry, who’d made herself comfortable across the foot of the bed, yawned and pushed herself back up. “Yeah. That’s a good idea. Let’s go.” She grabbed Cary’s arm and steered him toward the door. 

He held back long enough to point at Oliver. “ _Warn_ me, next time, if you’re going to come dream visiting. And definitely remember to get dressed, first!”

“Never fear!” Oliver saluted. “I have plenty of important factors to consider, and not nearly enough energy to deal with them tonight. So good night! I promise I won’t see you before morning!”


End file.
